Russia Builds Shadow Fleet of Gas Carriers as EU LNG Ban Looms

Russia is quietly assembling a shadow fleet of liquefied natural gas carriers, extending to gas the same sanctions-evasion playbook it built for crude oil, in a move designed to keep Moscow's energy revenues flowing once the European Union's import ban takes effect.

The Financial Times reported on Monday, citing data from maritime analytics firm Windward, that Russia's specialised covert gas fleet has grown to 25 vessels over the past six months. The expansion includes at least eight secondhand LNG tankers, each costing around $300 million and fitted with the cryogenic systems needed to carry gas at roughly minus 162 degrees Celsius, alongside two newly built carriers from the domestic Zvezda shipyard, Russia's first home-produced vessels of the type. Most are held through shell companies registered in jurisdictions such as Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore, obscuring their ownership.

The timing is deliberate. European nations bought nearly all the output from the Siberian Yamal facility in the first half of the year, but a total EU ban on Russian LNG under long-term contracts is due to take effect on 1 January 2027, closing off a market that has continued to fund the war in Ukraine. The gas build-up mirrors Moscow's oil strategy, where a shadow fleet now exceeding 1,000 vessels operates largely outside Western insurance and regulatory frameworks.

The oil fleet, meanwhile, is drawing an increasingly assertive European naval response. The Italian navy boarded a suspected shadow-fleet tanker in international waters off Pantelleria on 2 August, the latest in a series of interceptions that has seen at least nine such vessels seized across Europe since the start of the year, four of them by France. British Royal Marines separately boarded a sanctioned tanker in the Channel earlier this year.

For Brussels, the emergence of a parallel gas fleet raises the prospect that its 2027 ban may prove as difficult to enforce at sea as the oil price cap has been, keeping shadow tonnage and its attendant spill and sabotage risks a fixture of European waters.